So NOW he tells us that Michelle Muscat and his Carmen are old friends.

Read the story in The Times today about how Michelle Muscat rang her ‘old friend’ Carmen Ciantar and offered, on behalf of the Labour Party, private security for the Ciantar Pullicino Orlando Smiths. And how they accepted it.

Those who speak of Jeffrey as a Sicilian are correct. Here we have a member of parliament who sees absolutely nothing wrong in accepting gifts of services which put him in a position of obligation to the giver.

It would be bad enough if he had accepted this gift of services from a private individual or company. How much worse, then, and how much greater the implications and the undercurrents of what is going on, when he accepts it from the Opposition party.

This sort of thing is so acceptable by Jeffrey’s Sicilian standards that he actually boasts about it in the press.

This is absolutely horrifying.

Here, too, we have a Labour Party which clearly still believes in trading in influence and favours, giving something and getting something in return.

We also have a Labour Party in which it is acceptable for the wife of the party leader, who has no position in the party structure, to get involved in trading favours and influence on the party leader’s behalf.

And to think that Alfred Sant flew into government in 1996 on the strength of his war cry ‘hbieb tal-hbieb’.

THIS, my dear readers, is real corruption.

Corruption need not involve hard cash.

To think that anybody ever trusted Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando Smith and his snake-in-the-grass companion ever at all, even before the Mistra saga, now seems unbelievable. Looking back, no wonder certain things came to pass.

There is no point in looking for a reason, for the trigger that may have spurred Jeffrey’s outbursts over the last four years. This is the reason.

Everything else is just an excuse, an attempt to apportion blame and wash his hands of his own dirty work.

The reason Jeffrey has done what he has done is because for the last 10 years he has lived with a dyed-in-the-wool Laburista and party activist, who pretended disingenuously that she was not one for the duration, and who by his own admission NOW (but never before) is an old friend of the Labour leader’s wife and presumably, because this is how it is when old friends are married, of the Labour leader himself.

When these two old friends, Carmen and Michelle, meet, do they meet alone for coffee on a Saturday morning, or do they go out to supper and drinks with their husbands (or more to the point, stay indoors where nobody could see them)?

And what secrets and statements, what information, does Jeffrey let loose when he gets drunk and begins to rant, as he invariably does, to the point where he was thrown out of the VIP area at a David Guetta concert for drunken brawling?

How untrustworthy some people are. They operate by a completely different code.

Well, no wonder Jeffrey has always been so touchy about Carmen. No wonder he didn’t want anyone writing about her. No wonder he went nuts at the slightest sign of scrutiny of his relationship with That Woman. It wasn’t love. It was embarrassment and the fact that they both had plenty to hide which it didn’t suit them to reveal.

It’s not true that, as Jeffrey claims NOW, Carmen never hid the fact that she has remained a rabid Laburista throughout these last 10 years of living with him. If I knew she was a rabid Laburista while all that was going on, I would have stayed well away.

I wouldn’t have touched either of them with a barge-pole. Not only did she hide the fact, but she actually pretended to support the Nationalist Party and be anti-Labour.

Nine years ago, she was at a party to celebrate the victory of the Yes vote in the referendum, not the sort of place you’d expect to find a Labour Party activist, and over the years, she has gone with Jeffrey to several PN mass meetings and electoral campaign events (Nationalist, I feel I must point out at this stage), including the ‘mass meeting tar-rebha’ in 2008, when they were a sort of roundabout deliberately avoided by all the human traffic.

So this is why Jeffrey didn’t want anyone discussing her in the press or on this website: because he knew all along where her real loyalties lay. No wonder he described any such discussion as a personal attack and complained to the prime minister about it (because the prime minister, in his mind, is there to silence discussion).

And this is precisely why the freedom of the press is so important, and why pressures to avoid discussing such topics should be resisted.

Carmen Ciantar’s influence on Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando should have been discussed a long, long time ago, her activism for the Labour Party scrutinised and exposed.

And if all this had come out when it should have done, his relationship with her should have been grounds for deselection at the last two general elections. You can’t have people on your ticket who are literally sleeping with the enemy.

It’s what I said about Robert Musumeci four years ago when his affair with Jose Herrera’s very politically active sister was still largely secret. A man has to be able to go home and talk things over with the woman he lives with, so if that woman has badly divided loyalties and actually operates for the enemy, there are clear risks and problems.

Carmen Ciantar is not a mere Labour voter, like Jeffrey’s mother was, married to his PN voter father.

Carmen Ciantar is a Labour Party activist, actually working for the election of Labour, an old friend of the party leader’s wife, a woman who has a long and very involved history with the Labour Party, some of its politicians, and at least one of its secretaries-general.

And her husband-to-be is not a mere PN supporter either (he isn’t even that now) but a Nationalist Party politician.

Any information to which JPOS is privy can, in this situation, go further, even unwittingly, still more deliberately. That it has been going further, right to the top of the Labour Party, is now beyond dispute.

In situations like this, if the woman is smarter than he is, in terms of cunning rather than IQ – as with both Robert Musumeci and JPOS – the man ends up a pawn in the hands of a woman who strokes his ego into thinking he’s actually the player.

If Jeffrey were not so reprehensible, he would be a case as sad as his good friend Musumeci.

What can I say now?

No wonder so many things that happened, happened. No wonder information got passed on. No wonder copies of contracts appeared miraculously in Alfred Sant’s hands and nobody can work out how they got there.

No wonder that Joseph Muscat knew about this contract and stupidly blabbed (without any of the details) at a reception about the bombshell that Labour was going to drop in the last few days of the campaign, only to be overheard by somebody who alerted the Nationalist Party.

He knew about that Mistra contract. Joseph Muscat knew. And his wife and Jeffrey’s ‘wife’ are “old friends”.

Of course they’re old friends. Wouldn’t Michelle have been Alfred Sant’s secretary when he used to call Carmen to his office for consultation?

Now what on earth would a Harvard Phd need to consult Ms Yellow Pages about?

[Daphne – Best not to mention the subject. Jeffrey goes absolutely hysterical at the merest suggestion that Sant might have fancied her. Anyway, maybe he needed to consult her about a Mistra contract he’d heard of.]

So back in 1998 the then MLP government withdrew the security personnel protecting Richard Cachia Caruana. following an attempted murder, and today the MLP provides JPO with security because he voted with them.